[1] Musing beneath the Sibyls and before the Judgment of Michael Angelo, it is difficult not to picture to the fancy the arraignment of the Popes who built and beautified that chapel, when the Christ, whose blood they sold, should appear with His menacing right arm uplifted, and the prophets should thunder their denunciations:  ’Howl, ye shepherds, and cry; and wallow yourselves in the ashes, ye principal of the flock, for the days of your slaughter and your dispersions are accomplished.’

[2] The same incongruity appears also in Innocent VIII., whose bull against witchcraft (1484) systematized the persecution directed against unfortunate old women and idiots.  Sprenger, in the Malleus Maleficarum, mentions that in the first year after its publication forty-one witches were burned in the district of Como, while crowds of suspected women took refuge in the province of the Archduke Sigismond.  Cantu’s Storia della Diocesi di Como (Le Monnier, 2 vols.) may be consulted for the persecution of witches in Valtellina and Val Camonica.  Cp.  Folengo’s Maccaronea for the prevalence of witchcraft in those districts.

After Sixtus IV. came Innocent VIII.  His secular name was Giambattista Cibo.  The sacred College, terrified by the experience of Sixtus into thinking that another Pope, so reckless in his creation of scandalous Cardinals, might ruin Christendom, laid the most solemn obligations on the Pope elect.  Cibo took oaths on every relic, by every saint, to every member of the conclave, that he would maintain a certain order of appointment and a purity of election in the Church.  No Cardinal under the age of thirty, not more than one of the Pope’s own blood, none without the rank of Doctor of Theology or Law, were to be elected, and so forth.  But as soon as the tiara was on his head, he renounced them all as inconsistent with the rights and liberties of S. Peter’s Chair.  Engagements made by the man might always be broken by the Pope.  Of Innocent’s Pontificate little need be said.  He was the first Pope publicly to acknowledge his seven children, and to call them sons and daughters.[1] Avarice, venality, sloth, and the ascendency of base favorites made his reign loathsome without the blaze and splendor of the scandals of his fiery predecessor.  In corruption he advanced a step even beyond Sixtus, by establishing a Bank at Rome for the sale of pardons.[2] Each sin had its price, which might be paid at the convenience of the criminal:  150 ducats of the tax were poured into the Papal coffers; the surplus fell to Franceschetto, the Pope’s son.  This insignificant princeling, for whom the county of Anguillara was purchased, showed no ability or ambition for aught but getting and spending money.  He was small of stature and tame-spirited:  yet the destinies of an important house of Europe depended on him; for his father married him to Maddalena, the daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in 1487.